1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is directed to electronic file processing, and, more particularly, to electronic audio file processing.
2. Background of the Invention
Speech is increasingly the user interface of choice for e-commerce and many other types of data exchange over data communication networks such as the Internet. Accordingly, many audio files are being produced for use in conjunction with Interactive Voice Response (IVR) Systems. Such files can be incorporated into dialogs using software tools like Voice Extensible Markup Language (VoiceXML), or other audio-based markup languages. While audio can be generated synthetically, i.e. using text-to-speech technology, another common way of producing audio files for use in dialogs is to record speech from a speaker reading a script aloud.
A common practice in producing audio for use in an IVR System is to create audio files that contain long periods of silence both before and after the corresponding voice recording. It is also a common practice to deal with such long periods of silence in an audio file by trimming the file.
The needed effort for producing audio files has been reduced somewhat by a producer's being able to trim such a file automatically using conventional methods and systems. To date, however, there does not appear to have been any attempt to trim audio files with reference to the silences, pauses, and delays associated with typical human speech patterns. Whereas textual communication conveys via punctuation marks some of the natural patterns of speech, conventional audio trimming treats all inter-phrase intervals alike.
Failure to distinguish between the silence that follows a comma, for example, from that which follows a period, colon, or semi-colon can make phrase splicing problematic. Current devices and methods may automatically trim or synchronize audio and text files, but none appear to address trimming of audio files based on the their underlying textual content. Moreover, whereas there appears not to have been any recognition of this problem nor any attempt to ameliorate it, there similarly appears not to have been any attempt to devise a way to automatically trim an audio file in accordance with its underlying textual content in real-time.